Although it's not a regular staple in our motorsports diet, Car and Driver magazine isn't exactly a stranger to the Bonneville Salt Flats. In 1974, staffer Don Sherman pushed a much-modified Mazda RX-3 to 160.393 mph, followed that up with a 183.904 mph run in a Racing Beat Mazda RX-7 in 1978, and then earned a spot in Bonneville's 200-mph club with his 1986 effort: 238.442 mph in another Racing Beat RX-7, this one turbocharged. Seven years ago, editor-in-chief Csaba Csere also topped the 200-mph mark on the salt in a Lingenfelter Pontiac Firebird. Unfortunately, it didn't get into the record books, himself having made part of that run on the car's roof. Roof slides may make for vivid spectating, but the sanctioning bodies are strictly conventional on this point. Still, we were there.

An important part of being there, for Bonneville record seekers, is an understanding of the records (there are 491 classes for cars alone) that are ripe for the plucking. And when the Honda S2000 was introduced in 1999, Csere and engineer Chuck Jenckes (currently head of engine development for Dale Earnhardt Enterprises) saw just such an opportunity—a relatively modest mark (clue: no chance of a 200-mph roof slide with this one) established by an unlikely car. A record, moreover, that has enjoyed an unlikely duration: more than 15 years.

Let's establish a little perspective. There was more to this than the glory of Car and Driver. Not only did this record seem attainable, but breaking it, from the point of view of sports-car faithful, could be perceived as a sort of public service. To paraphrase the Blues Brothers, we were on a mission from, well, maybe not God, but at least from the late speed-record specialist Sir Malcolm Campbell.

See, the record in question—157.805 mph—was set in 1987 by a Ford Escort EXP.

Remember the EXP? If you don't, you're not alone, because it was one of history's most eminently forgettable cars. So was its Mercury cousin, the LN7. These two-seat variants of the Ford Escort and Mercury Tracer materialized in April 1981. The LN7 dematerialized in 1983, but the Ford version persisted. There was a brief production hiatus in 1985, but a face-lifted edition reappeared in '86 as the Escort EXP and survived until '88.

Even in an era of severely diminished expectations, the EXP was pretty tepid goods. Its asthmatic 1.9-liter SOHC four was rated at 108 horsepower and 114 pound-feet of torque, and at full wheeze it towed a C/D test driver to 60 mph in 9.8 seconds, covering the quarter-mile in 17.1 seconds at 81 mph (August 1986). Top speed, which occurred sometime after the driver had all but forgotten why he was making the trip, clocked in at a heady 109 mph.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this isn't the kind of acceleration we associate with blackouts. Nevertheless, the Doc Jeffries/Jack Dolan team showed up at Bonneville one fine day in 1987, unloaded an Escort EXP, and when the salt had settled, Dolan's name went into the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) books as the G/GT record holder.

How'd they do that? Given the milquetoast nature of the stock EXP engine, we were pretty curious about this achievement, since GT is a production-based class and doesn't leave much room for modifications, at least in terms of the car's body and chassis. GT stands for Grand Touring and includes 11 categories, from AA to J, contingent on engine displacement. G is for engines in the 1.51-to-2.00-liter range.

It wasn't until much later that we read the rules closely and got to the part that says "engine swaps are permitted, as long as they are of the same manufacturer."

Aha. Perhaps there was more to this EXP than we suspected? Yes, indeed, and we'll get back to that chapter later.

Meanwhile, whatever Jeffries and Dolan had done to their EXP back in '87 didn't really seem to matter. The slowest top speed we'd seen in a Honda S2000 was 146 mph ("Hot Tin Roofs," December 2002), and that was achieved in a car with very few miles on the odometer. With a little preparation, 158 mph looked like a piece of Marie Antoinette's favorite food. In fact, Jenckes boldly forecast that the S2000 would do 165 mph. Hey, how hard could it be?

Answer: harder than we thought.

Under the guidance of Jenckes, the S2000 project was assigned to Westech Performance Group in Mira Loma, California, with Westech partner John Baechtel in charge of preparing the car. Both Jenckes and Baechtel are old salts. Jenckes has served as the engineering guru in other Bonneville record runs. Baechtel, former editor-in-chief of Car Craft magazine and executive editor of Hot Rod magazine for 10 years before that, has been making passes at Bonneville since 1988, and he and Jenckes teamed to set records in 1990 at about 223 mph, using Baechtel's Pontiac Firebird. Baechtel's company handles engine testing for various performance-oriented magazines; calibration work for MSD Ignition, Denso, and Union 76; and development work for Barry Grant Fuel Systems.

Getting the car ready to go was a time-consuming process. The fundamentals-a roll cage and installing a proper fire system, racing seat, and five-point belts-presented no particular challenge, nor did some basic aero improvements: reducing the static ride height by two inches and installing a deeper front air dam, a Honda accessory. Autopower supplied the cage, and Tom Habrzyk, a Westech dyno technician, supplied a lot of the elbow grease, as well as unquenchable enthusiasm.

The tricky part of the project was getting more horsepower out of Honda's amazing S2000 engine, whose per-liter output-240 horsepower from 1997cc-exceeds that of any naturally aspirated production piston engine on the planet. As potent as the engine is, though, Jenckes and Baechtel knew that a little more power would be required for the mission, and the GT rules do allow considerable latitude for engine enhancements. Beyond lowering the VTEC threshold from 6500 to 5500 rpm, putting the aggressive cam lobes to work a little earlier, they settled on two primary modifications-optimizing the exhaust porting and adopting an aftermarket engine-control computer.

The port job was straightforward.

"We sent the head to Chuck in North Carolina, and it came back looking like something from a jeweler's shop," says Baechtel. The finished cylinder head was bolted to a Comptech stainless-steel header, and that took care of the major mechanical mods.

But getting the most out of the AEM computer wasn't a simple matter of plug in and turn on. Jenckes handled the mapping, and since every minute recalibration dictated another trip to the dyno-and Jenckes had pressing obligations with his Earnhardt operations-the power ramp-up was slow.

Nevertheless, the readouts on Westech's SuperFlow AutoDyn chassis dyno climbed steadily. Starting with a rear-wheel horsepower reading of 203 from the stock S2000, Baechtel and company saw as much as 243 as a result of the various mechanical enhancements, better fuel (114-octane Union 76), and a general tuneup.

"That was with the factory computer," says Baechtel. "The AEM computer added 12 to 14 horsepower. There's a lot to it, and the learning curve is pretty steep. But I think there's still more there-we just need more work on the mapping."

There were a couple other items on Baechtel's go-faster wish list. Camshafts, for example.

"We know we could have found some horsepower there," he says. "But nobody has cores for these cams.

"And we wanted to go with a different tire, but to do that we found out we'd have to get wheels custom-made. We couldn't find any with the right bolt pattern that also left enough room for the brake rotors."

That meant running with the stock Bridgestone Potenza S-02s, 205/55VR-16 in front, 225/50VR-16 at the rear. The Potenzas deliver excellent grip on dry pavement, but their fat footprints are a liability on the salt-too much aero drag, too much rolling resistance. Baechtel had hoped to come up with a set of wheels that would be suitable for some Mickey Thompson salt tires: no tread, a rounded (rather than flat) crown, and a narrow footprint. Developed for Bonneville, they're designed to track well on the salt, crunching down through the crust to deliver just enough bite to keep the car pointed more or less straight down the course. But that, along with some other details, was consigned to the "next time" bin.

On the other hand, after innumerable tuning tweaks, the Westech dyno registered a consistent 255 horsepower at about 8500 rpm. This was exactly where Jenckes wanted the power to peak, since at that point the car would be at the all-important three-mile mark on the salt, hustling along, it was hoped, at 160 or better mph. That rear-wheel number, incidentally, translated to about 332 horsepower at the crankshaft, according to the Westech dyno, and even though Baechtel saw this as "a little optimistic," he and Jenckes also figured the car was ready to go.

The plan was two-tiered. First, we'd go out there and wipe that EXP out of the Bonneville record books. Then Jenckes and Baechtel planned to add nitrous oxide to the engine's diet and set a record in the recently established G/FMS class. FMS stands for Fuel Modified Sports, and nitrous qualifies as fuel, a word that covers a broad variety of flammables, pretty much everything other than gasoline or diesel. Baechtel reckoned that adding laughing gas to the Honda's air-fuel mixture would boost output by about "75 to 90 horsepower," which in turn would theoretically yield a run in the area of 175-plus mph.

Owing to the lengthy development of the basic car, the nitrous system wasn't hooked up when the Honda got to Bonneville. The bottle cradles were mounted in the trunk, the plumbing had been installed, and there was a switch just ahead of the shifter to set the horsepower nutrient flowing. But Westech hadn't quite gotten to the testing phase, so the net effects of the inert system were to provide a fail-safe for the car's classification (very pertinent, as things turned out) and to add a bit of mass.

Ordinarily, our standard response to adding mass is essentially phobic. However, unlike most scenarios relating to automotive dynamics, at Bonneville, weight is perceived as an asset.

"It's one of the major tricks here," says Baechtel. "Adding weight makes the car more stable."

Accordingly, once Baechtel and Habrzyk had the Honda's interior gutted and its safety features in place, they added weight, bulking the car up to about 3200 pounds with an empty gas tank (versus 2896, with a full tank, in our most recent test of a production S2000). They also tinkered with weight distribution until they achieved near equality in the car's corner weights with the driver onboard and then loaded the car on a trailer and hauled it out to the salt.

It was at this point, with the preparation work completed, that a Car and Driver staff member showed up. That would be your humble narrator, a man who has a good many racing miles in his rearview mirrors-the tally includes 26 24-hour races-but no land speed records. For all my experience in vehicles equipped with roll cages and five-point belts, as far as the SCTA was concerned, I was a rookie.

There are those who might find this posture irritating, but not me. For one thing, the SCTA has been sanctioning speed runs since 1938-not only at Bonneville, but on California's El Mirage and Muroc dry lakes as well. For another, considering the number of annual checkpoints in my personal logbook, I find being regarded as a rookie in any motorsports activity to be novel and even a bit flattering. Sort of like being carded when you're over 40. Well over 40.

Advancing from rookiehood to record readiness wasn't all that tough, particularly since the record in our sight picture was well short of 200 mph. The tech people did give me some credit for previous racing experience, and once I'd demonstrated that I could activate the fire-extinguishing system, undo my belts, undo the window net, and get out of the car in less than 30 seconds, all I had to do was prove I could keep the car under control in a test run at less than 149 mph. The next threshold-between 150 and 174 mph-was in the realm of our record quest, so before you could say "pass the salt," I possessed not one but three SCTA competition licenses in categories E, D, and C. Perhaps I'll get a shot at categories B (175 to 199 mph), A (200 to 249), and AA (250 to 299) at some later date.

In any case, we were ready to get serious. And even though the target miles-per-hour mark looked easy enough-hey, most of you have gone faster than 160 on public roads, right?-I was feeling very serious. For one thing, the salt triggers responses that date to conditioning from my youth in Minnesota, where winter allowed driving on surfaces that only weeks earlier had been suitable for water skiing. The salt closely resembles a frozen lake-sort of like a scene from Fargo-and every time I drove on the stuff, my knuckles would whiten, my sphincter would tighten, and I'd find myself expecting the car to lose directional preference at any moment. Every time. Oh, jeez.

It's not quite that slippery, of course, but the coefficient of friction isn't equal to that of pavement, either. The salt pack can be almost as hard as concrete, but it granulates under a car's wheels, and grip isn't what you'd call abundant. I'd rank it just above that of a well-maintained gravel road. This means being careful with the throttle, since getting loose can mean a spin or worse.

Another unexpected surface element is random bumpiness. The salt looks billiard-table smooth from a distance, but it's covered with crusty little veinlike ripples meandering across its surface, as well as small bumps and potholes, all of which are essentially invisible in the midday sun. The car meanders slightly over this stuff, and even though the sensations coming up through my gluteal alarm centers weren't in the realm of nearer-my-god-to-thee, the Honda's tiller had my full attention.

Beyond that, as I strapped in for my first run, my intracranial VCR kept replaying editor-in-chief Csere's 1995 crash, an event captured on videotape for the entertainment of the staff. Himself's transition from a full-power run to a back flip looks nightmarishly abrupt. Moreover, when I arrived for my SCTA indoctrination on a sunny Thursday morning, a medevac helicopter was just heading east, carrying 71-year-old Nolan White, a 40-year Bonneville veteran, to University Hospital in Salt Lake City.

White owns the record for wheel-driven (as distinct from jet-powered) cars, at 413.156 mph, a mark he set last summer in his twin-engine streamliner. He was attempting to improve on that record at the October meet and had made a pass in excess of 422 mph. But when White attempted to get the streamliner stopped, his drag chutes detached themselves on deployment. All three of them. In sequence. The braking system in most purpose-built (as distinct from production-based) speed-record cars is extremely skimpy-they really do build these things to go, not to stop-and with Interstate 80 approaching at something over 300 mph, White attempted to get the streamliner to turn. When he did, it hit a soft spot and began to roll, disintegrating as it did so.

The message was clear: Although the likelihood of severe consequences ramps up as a function of speed, the salt can bite anyone. Hard. White would die on Sunday. As of Thursday, however, all that was known was that White was severely injured. His crash increased the intimidation factor for a first-timer, but this evaporated after my first real run. Aside from a slight tendency to wander, the Honda went down the course without drama-and intimidation quickly gave way to frustration.

Wait. Did I say quickly? Check that. Quickly applies to getting down the course. Getting to the course makes the digestive process of a goat-eating boa constrictor look speedy. Waiting in line four or five hours isn't uncommon, and the patience of Bonneville regulars rivals that of rock-concert ticket campers.

It's similar to the old aerial combat analogy: hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of intense adrenaline rush.

But after just a couple runs, I found that my own adrenaline was increasingly tempered by diminishing expectations for our quest. The short version: We didn't make it. Although conditions were close to ideal for the half-dozen runs we made between Thursday and Saturday morning, the best I could coax out of the Honda was 154.241 mph, every run marked by spitting and popping from the engine, particularly at higher rpm.

My own contribution to this series of near misses was minor, but noteworthy. With optimal Bonneville conditions-dry and cool, about 50 degrees-I tried a new shifting technique, going from first to second, missing it, upshifting to the certainty of third, then back down to second to get back into the power band. This didn't take much time-it seemed like a mere half-hour or so-and I made the rest of that Saturday morning run without incident.

When Baechtel and Habrzyk arrived to tow the Honda back to the end of the staging line-the only place the race cars are allowed to move under their own power is on the course-I suggested that perhaps the missed shift didn't make much difference.

"You ran 153.900," he replied, his tone neutral. "If it weren't for that shift, I think you would have hit 155."

Oh, well.

I hit my 154.241 on the next run, the best yet, but it was increasingly clear that we were not going to achieve 158 mph, despite savvy tweaks by Baechtel and Habrzyk-varying the fuel pressure, scraping accumulated salt out of the wheel wells between runs, coating the car's front and sides with WD-40 to keep salt from clinging to the surface. Accordingly, Baechtel announced Plan B. Even though the nitrous system wasn't ready to go, we'd run for the G/FMS record.

Since it didn't matter to the SCTA whether we actually ran with nitrous, the only challenge with our new tactic lay in making the car look sufficiently modified to satisfy the tech staff. Baechtel and Habrzyk achieved this by blocking off part of the Honda's grille opening with cardboard, and slathering the front of the car with duct tape, a task complicated by the layer of WD-40. A gallon of Windex, three rolls of paper toweling, and a couple rolls of duct tape later, the SCTA tech inspector signed off, and we were ready to roll.

Setting a record requires two runs, one in each direction on the north-south course. We made the qualifying pass late Saturday and the confirming run early Sunday morning. Although the Honda seemed particularly unhappy with Sunday's chilly air-35 degrees-the record went into the books: a two-way average of 153.864.

If that doesn't seem blindingly fast, consider this: If we'd gone this fast in early 1926, it would have been the absolute land speed record. And anyway, we were pleased to salvage something.

So why didn't the Honda bump the EXP from the record books?

There were several post-event theories.

First, there was the altitude factor. Although the salt flats look like the underpinnings of all creation, that vast white plain is 4200 feet high. Like all salt savvies, Jenckes and Baechtel figured this into their computer mapping, but the effective altitude does vary with ambient temperature. On hot days, for example, the effective altitude can soar to 8000 or more feet with a consequent erosion of horsepower.

Then there were the Honda's combustion hiccups. Jenckes and Baechtel were both suspicious of the fuel. All Bonneville competitors must use fuel supplied by the Engine Research Company (ERC).

Baechtel started with a 110 oxygenated leaded fuel recommended by ERC, but when he checked the Honda's plugs after three or four runs, he wasn't happy with the dark discoloration he saw on the electrodes. Baechtel and Habrzyk changed the plugs and then emptied the tank and went with ERC's 100-octane unleaded. Result: The plugs stayed clean, but there was no discernible change in the car's performance. The spitting and popping continued, and acceleration in sixth gear was glacial. If we'd been able to use the five-mile course, we might have made it, but for cars whose capability is below 175 mph, the speed is measured at the three-mile mark.

Although neither Jenckes nor Baechtel could account for the intermittent misfire-"It ran clean when we got it home and put it on the dyno again," says Baechtel-both are convinced a little more horsepower is needed to get the job done.

"I think now we'll have to go inside the engine, instead of just working with the cylinder head," says Baechtel. "I think at the very least we'll want to take the compression up a point [from 11.1:1 to 12.1:1]."

"The calculated top speed was based on drag coefficient and frontal area, both of which were estimated," says Jenckes. "Obviously, the car had more drag than estimated. It now seems that an additional 15 horsepower will be required."

Which brings us back to that old EXP, hardly a paragon of aerodynamic efficiency. We tracked down Doc Jeffries and learned that his work with the stock engine consisted of extracting it from the car and throwing it away. He then located a 1600cc DOHC English Ford racing engine, which he used as a starting point, installing a new crank, pistons, rods, and cams.

Although Jeffries is a little hazy about the details, he recalls output as "a little more than 400 horsepower.

"That little engine was a son of a bitch," he recalls. "Durable, too. We set a lot of records with that one."